Kevin Carmony of Linspire/Freespire has announced that the first beta of Freespire has been released earlier than anticipated. Get it from the download page. According to Carmony, this release includes out-of-the-box support for proprietary formats such as .mp3 and WMV, plug-and-play support for Ati and nVIDIA cards without user intervention, Click-N-Run, and much more.

I was impressed to see the CEO of a Linux disto personally responding to posts here. That is something you rarely see nowadays, regardless of company size. For that reason alone (and possibly other reasons ;P ), I'm going to download and try Freespire.

Great. Please let me know what you think.

I'm currently dual-booting between Windows XP Home (came with the Dell laptop) and Ubuntu 6.06. The reason why I often find myself booting Windows is because of Ubuntu's inability to play certain proprietary audio/video formats.

Sounds like the regular version of Freespire might be just right for you then.

...although I will be sure to choose Gnome over KDE if there is such an option in the Freespire installer.

By default Linspire is KDE, and most of our attention and polishing is there, but you can certainly use apt or cnr to get the GNOME GDM.